there was a time back in the day.. when Seagate was considered the strongest HDD in asia... I have a 9.1 G SCSI that is like way old.. and no issues what so ever.. I dont know when and how they lost their "good HDD" rep... I guess after having bought laptops and going away from the desktop self-build environment.. im out of touch with hardware...

I've had older western Digital drives fail on me, HARD. when my OLD 20 gig went out it took the whole ide side it was on down with it, but luckily it didn't damage the other drive. My sisters old castoff 6.4 died, My step sisters 99 Maxtor finally died, mine still works. When hers died it appears it took out a fairly new 120 we had just added becuase her old drive was having boot problems :( They all die eventually given enough time and abuse but some tend to die early and kill anything around them when they do. They have dropped prices so far that now they cut the warranty and it appears that WD has even gone to a cheaper manufacturer for some of their drives. Now they'll happily sell you the warranty you were supposed to get. I look hard for older WD drives that still have 3 years on them but they are mostly out of the pipeline now. I have now started using the smart utility on my board so hopefully we'll get some warning next time before one goes completely. I also have many drives in here and I spread out my data, also several have older OS versions I can boot to to get things fixed.